Transcript of Sin eng-53 - busy buses
- 1. Raffles Institution Year 2 Research EducationDesign for
Change School Challenge 2011 Slow Bus Services By Team Leader:
Jordan Ng (2M) Team Members: Leben Chew (2K) Jovan Chan (2I) Aaron
Chou (2I) Teacher Mentor: Mrs Ramesh
- 2. AbstractThe aim of this Design for Change Challenge project
is to investigate the waiting timesfor buses around Raffles
Institution, to find out whether the timings affected the
studentsnegatively, and if so, to make changes to that problem. We
contacted our minister, Mrs.Josephine Teo. We sent our survey
findings to her and requested that she assist us inpropelling our
project forward. We received a letter that included suggestions so
as toimprove our projects, written from her stating that she will
be happy to forward ourfindings to SBS. As minister of Transport,
she also vowed to help us make a change.Shortly after, we received
a phone call from SBS, and answered a few questionspertaining to
the problem. This is good news for us as the survey questions were
givenout to students who take the buses around Raffles Institution.
The survey results showthat the bus timings were indeed long and do
pose a problem for the students who takethem. As such, an action
week was planned out to address this issue and hopefullymake
lasting changes to this problem. ii
- 3. AcknowledgementsOur project would not have been possible
without the help of many people. As such wewould like to
acknowledge the help of these people.Firstly, our teacher-mentor,
Mrs Ramesh, for helping us and giving constructive adviceto improve
our projects.We also thank Member of Parliament, Mrs Josephine Teo,
for helping to make ourproject a success.Lastly, we also extend our
gratitude to the students who helped with our survey,everyone who
came forth to sign our petition and our friends and families for
theirsupport. iii
- 4. Contents:Title Page
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
iAbstract
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
iiAcknowledgements
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
iiiTable of Contents
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ivChapter 1: Introduction
...............................................................................1
Why we chose Design for Change Our objectivesChapter 2: Background
research
............................................................2 Our
survey Results of our surveyChapter 3: Our action week
.....................................................................3
Brief description of action plan Days 1-7Chapter 4: Discussion
.............................................................................5
Limitations What we learnedReferencesAppend IvChapter 1:
Introduction
- 5. We chose to take part in this Design for Change challenge as
we were greatlymotivated by the many problems in our society. Like
many societies, having problems isinevitable. It is impossible to
have a society with no problems at all. However, we canstill try to
reduce the amount of problems as much as possible, and this can
beachieved through the help of each and every one of its citizens.
As such, we felt thatthis Design for Change challenge was very
meaningful and we wanted to make achange to help improve this
problem.Our project has 2 main objectives, firstly to investigate
the waiting times or busesaround Raffles Institution and to gather
evidence that these waiting times poseproblems for the students.
Lastly, to present our findings to SBS and hope thatimprovements
will be made.Public transport is widely used in Singapore. Many
people rely on public transport to getto their destination every
day. Therefore it is essential that Singapores public
transportsystem is efficient with little problems to prevent the
many people who rely on it fromgetting late.There are many
complaints that Singaporeans have about our public transport
system,namely for buses, as there are traffic jams and other
complications that make thewaiting times for buses erratic, which
can become a major problem in Singapores face-paced society.We have
noticed that the waiting times for buses have been getting more
erratic, andwe felt that this may cause students to be late and
pose a problem for them. Thereforewe decided to embark on this DFC
challenge to hopefully make improvements to thisproblem. 1Chapter
2: Background research
- 6. In order to present our claims to SBS and hope for changes,
we must first gatherenough evidence to support our claims. We
gathered our evidence through the use ofsurveys, which were given
out to a group of 60 randomly selected students from
RafflesInstitution. The results of our survey gave us information
about the bus waiting times,how students feel about them and
whether they pose a problem to them.Our survey results are as
follows. 76.66% of the students feel that the waiting times
areindeed long, with an average time of 12.3 minutes, and the
longest times they havewaited averages at 28 minutes, with timings
as long as an hour.As u can see from the pie chart below, these
erratic timings have caused a majority ofthe students we surveyed
to be late at least once, with 41.67% of them being late often.With
this information, we decided to embark on our action week. 2Chapter
3: Our action week
- 7. Our action week consists of seven non-consecutive days of
activities, with each dayconsisting of a few hours worth of
activitiesOur action plan went like this; we would, on the first
day, create a Facebook page onthe service of SBS buses outside our
school, and raise awareness about this issue.Next, we would spend
the allocated 3 days on publicity, as well as to inform them
aboutthe methods we are going to use to solve the problem.
Following that, we would spendtwo days gathering signatures for our
petition. Ultimately, we spent the last day talkingto Mrs.
Josephine Teo, the Minister of Finance and Transport.We started off
by each linked our individual pages to the Facebook page,
andrecommended it to people. This allowed us to gain more likes and
support. We alsohave been regularly updating the page with
questions and posts about our project.For the next three days, we
held a joint exhibition along with all the other DFC groups
inRaffles Institution. The exhibition was held at the main atrium
and many students andteachers came down to take a look at our
posters and learn more about the varioustopics we are focusing on.
On our poster, we had added a petition and many studentsand
teachers did come forth to take a look at our poster and sign our
petition. Thesedays were spent in a rotating shift, with different
members of the team tending to ourposter each day.For another two
days, our petition was given to our individual classes, namely; 2M,
2Kand 2I, as well as our own friends. in addition, we also spent
time going around schooland approaching several students to explain
our project to them, and proceeded to askthem to sign on our
petition to help support our cause. over the course of these 2
daysas well as the 3 days the petition was put on the poster, we
managed to attain over 300signatures on our petition. 3
- 8. On the last day of our action week, we made use of the Meet
the People sessions heldevery Tuesday night to approach the MP of
Bishan-Toa Payoh GRC, Mrs JosephineTeo. We presented our our
findings to her and requested of her that she assist us
inpropelling our project forward. A few days later, we received a
letter written from herstating that she will be happy to forward
our findings to SBS for their use in planningservice improvements.
(Appendix A) This is good news for us as it means we are nowone
step closer to achieving our goal of improving the waiting times of
buses around ourschool.Chapter 4: Discussion
- 9. Throughout the course of this project, we had faced many
difficulties and limitations.The first of which we would like to
share was that on 16th August, the day of the Meetthe People
session, the Member of Parliament, Mrs Josephine Teo, was late and
didnot turn up for the session. So we solved this by handing our
letter to one of the staff,which then proceeded to pass our letter
to the MP on our behalf.Another problem we faced was that when we
left our petition on our poster or when wepassed students the
petition to sign, they did not sign properly. We solved this
problembeing around to make sure they sign properly and not just
leave the petition unattended.We also faced the problem of being
unable to arrange times to meet up, especiallyduring events in our
action week, such as the days of the exhibition or the Meet
thePeople session. This was largely because we had CCAs and other
activities ondifferent days of the week and there was not a day
where we were all free. Although thisproblem could not be fully
solved, we managed to get past it by making the
necessarysacrifices, to find days where we were allowed by the
respective people in charge tomiss CCA or the activity and take
time off to meet up. This taught us that we had to getour
priorities straight, as many a time we cant always get what we
want.During the course of this Design for Change challenge, we are
happy to say that wefulfilled all our objectives. This project
allowed us to understand the dynamics ofpetitioning and about how
to bring about change. We feel that it was a great opportunityfor
us to learn about serving the community, and being able to bring a
change that canaffect us. At the beginning of this project, it
seemed quite daunting to think that we, 4normal secondary 2
students, are going to bring about a positive change in our
society.But however, after brainstorming for ideas and taking this
project step by step, we haveactually came a long way. As long as
we believed that I can make a change, we coulddo it. The first step
was always the most difficult, but once we found our footing,
wewere able to accomplish our goals. 5Appendix A -
- 10. Letter from Member of Parliament, Mrs Josephine Teo
(scanned)